Hamas, Israel, and Online Discourse

How Israel's war against Hamas reinvigorates an inherent issue of online discourse

Once I have come across this article on the internet and read it, I must confess that I wasn't surprised since it was happening on Twitter, which has always been problematic even before Elon took over, but worsened rapidly after he took over. «The Washington Post»

But it's also symptomatic of a culture where paroles have trumped elaborate, fine-tuned arguments especially on thorny issues. What I mean is: Instead of detailing why they, for example, would support Palestinians despite their strong endorsement of the Hamas, the organisation whose rape, murder and pillage spree has triggered this all-out war, they will just share hashtags and paroles that you could easily repeat loud and wide on protests, and later wonder why the response to this is equally hateful and dispirited. As we would say in German: “So, wie man es in den Wald hineinruft, so kommt es auch wieder heraus”.

The October 07 Conflict between Israel and Hamas

The Question of the Genocidal Conduct 

THE AD HOMINEM

First of all, an ad-hominem argument I want to discuss early so that we can ignore it hereafter because ad-hominem arguments are fallacies for a reason. What usually comes into my mind is the fact that Ramaphosa had good reason to perhaps not bother with transnational conflicts not even tangentially relevant to a country like his. South Africa does not play a major role in any international alliance, so that there is no reason to push itself into the limelight. If he wanted to solve conflicts, he should sweep in front of his own doorstep, first of all. General poverty¹ frequently triggers violence on the streets, in the shape of robberies and thievery, the police cannot get hold of it². When his country passed the lawsuit, he announced it on his LinkedIn profile too, and the comments, particularly the top comment, spoke for themselves³. Those are not (just) boeren who fear to become targets of POC⁴, those are POC who fear that they could be begotten by their peers. So, in my opinion, as a side argument, Ramaphosa had enough conflicts to care about at the homefront, there is no need to move the points of interest abroad. One argument on why he does that are elections: Recently, he has announced that the general election will be held on May 09, 2024⁵, so this could be part of his re-election campaign, to stylise himself as a civil-rights activist in the fashion of Nelson Mandela, who is now placed up front with the quote that " our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians"⁶. The second part of the quote--that the same applied to Timor Leste--is of course crapped out because those people don't care about Timor Leste, the fewest could even tell where the country is even located⁷. But the more concerning, hypocritical point is that today's ANC is audacious enough to still call itself the party of Mandela, a misnomer comparable to the Trump GOP calling itself "the party of Lincoln"⁸. Also, if Nelson Mandela were still alive today, I think that while he were seriously concerned about the Palestinians' well-being, for which everyone had a reason, I think he were firstly more concerned about his own people, which made sense. Back in 1997, things looked brighter for South Africa. Nowadays, they are back at zero. Coming back to the speech that is so often cited (without context or source, to my great destitution), it should also be noted that he held then-Israeli president Yitzak Rabin in high regard for his contributions to the Oslo Agreements. For context: Rabin was later murdered by Zionists for those same contributions⁹. I cannot tell in what way this is relevant, but I thought that those who didn't know should know.

“Christian” Nationalism?

 Trump, the Heritage Foundation, and the Threat of a US Theocracy

It has become undeniable by now that Trump is likely going to become the candidate who, while not necessarily endorsing it himself, will represent the idea of “Christian Nationalism” in the 2024 General Election, at least as per the definition think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and others have forged. At first glance, this idea seems contradictory, given that Trump often represents the exact opposite of Christian ideals: He's an adulterer who has paid off an adult-movie starlet so that their affair did not become public; he's a pathological liar who has often enough sown hatred against the needy and his next ones; the man who couldn't quote any part of the Bible who has likely never looked into the Good Book. Apparently to such organisations, it's not about having someone to represent the ideals he's supposed to infuse into their policies, but someone they can manipulate for their own means. And ever since Michael Wolff's book “Fire & Fury”, it's known that everyone around him has used him as a puppet rather than a serious president with whom one could have discussions on policies from which to draw compromises that would finally convince both sides in Congress¹. The second tenure, if it were going to materialise, would be no different, only with more extreme manipulators in the White House and outside thereof.

Plastic, Paper and Perdition

 How Recycling becomes the Tip of Climate-Change Scales

Germany is often being reprimanded for its underperformance in recycling, despite its reputation as a pioneer and avantgarde[1]. Expectedly, outside of Germany, it doesn't look better, to a degree that pointing towards Germany's allegedly innovative separation of different wastes doesn't hold up to one's own underperformance: A recently published study[2] has shown that in the US, paper and cardboard worth millions of dollars are wasted due to improper recycling procedures. Now it was not the point to emphasise the waste of paper as all wastes that can be reprocessed are ought to. This accounts for wastes like plastic, which is known to infest the oceans and, in microscopically small shape, enters our bodies, from which it can even be “inherited”[3]. (Not to speak of the fact that very little plastic is actually being recycled, despite having just the right traits to be nearly infinitely being recycled[4]) But paper is a particularly crucial issue because of the raw material it is produced of, namely wood. Trees play an important role in our combat against climate change because of their essential ability to convert CO2 into oxygen. Many times when people became aware of Brazilian farmers' deforestation in the Amazon forest to create more arable land, the rainforest was described as the 'lung of the earth', a false equivalence[5] not only because algae in the oceans encapsulate disproportionately more CO2 than the rainforest[6]. (Algae can also contain hazardous materials like Bisphenol A[7]) But trees still play a major role, indisputably, which is also the reason why awareness has risen for the need to plant more trees altogether, globally, while reducing their felling for whichever purposes. We have already seen the consequences of losing entire forests while degrading their amount simultaneously because of vermin such as the bark beetle.[8][9]

My Christmas Message for 2023

 On Christmas, Politics & Society

Now the countdown has begun again: 14 days until Christmas. Many in our street have begun illuminating their house, decking the inside and outside with lavish decorations as if they needed to be visible from space, and of course the first christmas-themed sweets were already purchasable in late summer. All of this made me wonder again about how little the whole eve actually mattered amidst this ludicrous pomp. In Germany, we've got the famous skit movie entitled „Weihnachten bei Hoppenstedts”, where said pomp is being ridiculed, but as always, the best comedy is based on at least a grain of truth.